“When the word is used metaphorically, it emphasises the elusiveness of human existence. Human life is hevel because it is impermanent, because we change and ultimately die. “When Solomon describes “everything” as vapour, he is … highlighting the elusiveness of the world, which slips through our fingers and escapes all our efforts to manage it. He is pointing to the brevity of life, and everything in it, which dissolves as quickly as the mist in the morning.”
Life is Meaningless Life is Fleeting
Ecclesiastes 1:3-7 3 What do people gain from all their labors at which they toil under the sun? 4 Generations come and generations go, but the earth remains forever. 5 The sun rises and the sun sets, and hurries back to where it rises. 6 The wind blows to the south and turns to the north; round and round it goes, ever returning on its course. 7 All streams flow into the sea, yet the sea is never full.
Life is Meaningless Life is Fleeting Because… • It has no purpose
Life is Meaningless Life is Fleeting Because… • It has no purpose “Just like the sun does the same thing every day and the wind does the same thing every day and the streams and the oceans, just like nature testifies that we’re stuck in this kind of circular silliness.” -Matt Chandler
Ecclesiastes 1:8-11 8 All things are wearisome, more than one can say. The eye never has enough of seeing, nor the ear its fill of hearing. 9 What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. 10 Is there anything of which one can say “Look! This is something new”? It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time. 11 No one remembers the former generations, and even those yet to come will not be remembered by those who follow them.
Life is Meaningless Life is Fleeting Because… • It has no purpose • Nothing in life satisfies
Life Under The Sun
Life Under The Sun • a perspective that leaves God out of the picture
Life Under The Sun • a perspective that leaves God out of the picture • is a result of the fall
Romans 8:18-20 18 I consider that our present sufferings are not
worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. 19 For the creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed. 20 For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it
Romans 8:21 in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God.
And this is the way the creator made the world this way so that we would learn to receive life as it comes from his hand and not buy into the lie that we are in control of how it unfolds. Recognizing this the “hevel” of things is a path to greater wisdom. Because when we can accept that there will always be something absurd in the outcome of life and our best efforts and that the creator’s logic is deeper and wiser than anything we can reason or hope to grasp in our finite wisdom, it frees us to simply be who we are in this moment and to take the world as it comes in this moment and to not waste time begrudging, chasing or fearing or regretting things that are hevel.
A Change In Perspective
A Change In Perspective •
A shift in focus from the “hevel” to the Creator
A Change In Perspective • •
A shift in focus from the “hevel” to the Creator Look to the Gift Giver for fulfillment not the gifts